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Content Type: News & Analysis
The notorious Clearview AI first rose to prominence in January 2020, following a New York Times report. Put simply, Clearview AI is a facial recognition company that uses an “automated image scraper”, a tool that searches the web and collects any images that it detects as containing human faces. All these faces are then run through its proprietary facial recognition software, to build a gigantic biometrics database.
What this means is that without your knowledge, your face could be stored…
Content Type: Explainer
Following sustained reporting by researchers, journalists and activists around the world, including recent disclosures exposed by the PegasusProject, the surveillance industry is facing scrutiny like never before.
In the latest move, eighteen U.S. lawmakers have today demanded that the U.S. government imposes sanctions on four non-US surveillance companies for, as they mention in their letter, facilitating “disappearance, torture and murder of human rights activists and journalists”.
The move…
Content Type: News & Analysis
An excerpt of this piece was first published in June 2020 in Adbusters, an international not-for-profit magazine produced by a global collective of artists and activists who want to 'shake up complacent consumer culture'.
Big oil. Big tobacco. Big pharma. How did we let ‘big tech’ happen? You would have thought humanity would learn its lesson. That nothing good comes of the mass accumulation and concentration of power into the hands of so few.
The internet was meant to be different. No…
Content Type: Case Study
Privacy matters. It matters when you’re walking the streets of your home town and when you’re fleeing your home in search of safety. It matters if you’re at a protest or if you’re in bed.
Our wellbeing in each of these instances depends on the protection of our privacy. No situation can be fully understood in isolation.
Unjustifiable intrusions on our privacy become a weapon to eradicate communities and prey upon refugees and asylum seekers, push people away from protests in fear of…
Content Type: Explainer
Hello friend,
You may have found your way here because you are thinking about, or have just submitted, a Data Subject Access Request, maybe to your Facebook advertisers like we did. Or maybe you are curious to see if Policing, Inc. has your personal data.
The right to access your personal data (or access right) is just one of a number of data rights that may be found in data protection law, including the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, better known as "GDPR", which took…
Content Type: Case Study
Since August 2017 742,000 Rohingya people - including children - fled across the Myanmar border to Bangladesh, escaping what the UN labelled a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.
In this context of ethnoreligious violence, Facebook has been a central figure. For many in Myanmar “Facebook is the internet” - as of January 2018 around 19 million people in Myanmar were facebook users, this is roughly equal to the number of internet users in the country.
A New York Times report revealed that…
Content Type: Case Study
There are 29.4 million refugees and asylum seekers across the globe today. These are people who have fled their countries due to conflict, violence or persecution seeking protection in safer environments.
People have protected those in need fleeing from dire situations since antiquity. However, over recent years, European countries have become increasingly hostile towards refugees - treating them as criminals instead of people in need.
In 2017, German authorities passed a…